Disruptive photovoltaic (PV) technologies that imitate the principles of digital printing as a means of manufacturing devices offer the promise of low-cost along with the advantages of unique form factors and high throughput processing. Inorganic-organic hybrid, perovskite-based thin-film photovoltaics is a relatively new technology, but it has quickly become a highly impressive contender in this field, underpinned by several impressive characteristics, including high certified device efficiencies, low temperature solution processability, and mechanical flexibility. Additionally, such photovoltaic devices are light weight, comprised of earth-abundant materials, and are chemically tunable. To date, most demonstrations of this technology have been limited to lab scale and based on an extremely labor intensive manual spin-coating process in an inert atmosphere. In order to drive the technology beyond the academic environment and to facilitate further development for commercialization, significant research efforts focused on the ‘lab-to-fab’ translation of the fabrication methods are needed. Unfortunately, the transfer of device results derived from spin-coated photoactive layers in a standard laboratory setup to fabrication level devices is non-trivial due to the enormous complexity of the thin-film perovskite growth dynamics and the lack of a generic protocol for fabricating high quality, high performing films which would ultimately lead to efficient solar cell devices. Indeed, the active layer's morphology critically influences its optoelectronic properties and, in turn, the overall device PV performance. Furthermore, the optimized perovskite solar cell performances for lab scale, spin-coated devices tend to be highly technique-sensitive as a result of the different mechanisms that drive the active layer film formation.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method for shifting perovskite solar cell fabrication away from the benchtop and toward a more automated, reproducible, and scalable fabrication approach.